A battered S-FEL 10 sputtered, and a bolt flew off its hull into the vacuum of outer space. To an outside observer, the ship might have been maintained entirely without spaceflight in mind. Aluminum side panels flapped as it glided, and desperate screws teetered on doom. A wise pilot would reject the craft outright.
Inside sat Ed Orson, as old and unstable as his ship. Orson kept one of the few known S-FEL 10s left in circulation and had a strong affection for it. With no friends, and no living family left, his love for the ship came before all else. Any time and money sunk into its neverending repairs were worth it to him. The hazardous state of the S-FEL was of no concern to Orson; this had been its default for years. He loved it for what it was, and he creaked and groaned along with his ship, a cigarette dangling lazily from his lower lip.
Orson looked out the window. To his left, a blanket of stars spread out over the black expanse before him, stretching far past comprehension. Scattered across this canvas lay clusters of small, man-made moons on top of which stood little homes, shops, and other buildings.
“Grmph,” observed Orson. Trails of smoke rose slowly from his nose as his eyes traced a small silver beetle’s journey across the window. The scowling pilot thought little of space, beyond his ship. But for the beetle and the clanks and hums of the S-FEL, Orson was alone. As his cigarette burned to ash, his attention drifted from the window and Orson glanced ahead; he had arrived.
He parked horribly on the dusty, red moon’s surface and climbed out of the ship. The S-FEL gave a lurch of relief, settling into the atmosphere around its creaking hull. It waited patiently for him as he made his way to the garage. Inside the shop, the walls billowed steam, and bangs and crashes rang from all sides. Orson sniffed. The wall of heat and noise in the room pressed rudely up against him. He was neither overjoyed by the likely expensive repairs he was going to need nor was he put at ease by the faint scraping sound coming from somewhere he couldn’t place.
“Anyone home?” he barked, and, moments later, a sound like shattering plates came from the back door. A round, sweaty, little man flew head-first into the main room of the workshop and skidded to a halt at Orson’s feet, hacking up a cloud of dust.
“Thanks a lot, Ed,” The man had a voice like coal; rough and under intense pressure. “You broke my concentration!” Black powder covered his person from head to toe. He resembled an egg stuffed into a pair of coveralls.
“Another lost customer, then?” Orson looked down at the man and smelled singed hair. The top of the mechanic’s balding head shone orange under the flickering lights of his shop, and, on a belt stretched tight around his bulbous middle hung a dozen heavy-looking tools that clattered together as Orson’s words deflated him. A silver beetle clung to his breast pocket.
“Personal project. No more customers left to lose, lately,” the mechanic gave a low sigh. “You know that, Ed.” The pair made their way into the back room and Orson’s skin crawled. The scraping noise had not stopped, and Orson could not tell where it was coming from.
“What is that sound?” Orson demanded of thin air.
The mechanic was distracted, trying to attend to a small fire that had leapt to life in the corner of the room. He was not successful. It spread to a stack of scattered papers and he yelped.
“The towels, Ed, the towels!” he cried, but Orson was already in motion, scrambling to the opposite side of the workshop where a pile of filthy rags lay. He searched frantically until he found the largest one, then hurried to the fire. Successfully, albeit clumsily, quelling the blaze, Orson collapsed against the wall and coughed hard. With the fire extinguished, the mechanic only became more distressed.
“My papers!” He tried pointlessly to pick up their blackened remains, but the ash disintegrated in his hands. He let out a strangled wail. “All that work, Ed!” he collapsed, “Gone! Dust! Completely worthless!”
Orson did not speak. He stood slowly and looked for a while at the scene the fire had created. The scraping noise still had not stopped.
“What were the papers for?” he asked, finally looking down at the mechanic.
“It’s no use, now, didn’t you hear me? Dust, Ed!”
“I’m familiar with dust.” Orson could not recall an idea of the mechanic’s that had ever been fully-fledged enough to be ruined, let alone reduce him to tears. “What were they so important for? I thought you had no more customers left to disappoint.”
“They were going to get me out of this nightmare, Ed! And now they’re dust! Dust!”
“Enough dust. Can you explain to me what you were trying to make? And can you do something about that goddamn sound?” It had gotten louder and Orson was growing increasingly uneasy. The mechanic was practically shaking.
“Someone had to do it, Ed,” the mechanic was wringing his hands, “and I sure as hell wasn’t going to go down there and see what was what! I needed an automaton. I knew I couldn’t get a license, and I damn well knew no board of ethics would certify this kind of use for a humanoid! I just want to get rid of- whatever it is!” His gaze was fixed pointedly at the floor.
“Can you speak to me like a human?” Orson lit another cigarette to calm himself, but it didn’t help much. “Answer me. What’s going on? And look me in the eye while you’re at it.” The mechanic gave a miniature spasm and pulled himself into an unpleasantly rigid posture.
“You don’t know what it’s been like, Ed,” the mechanic shuddered. “It just won’t stop! Night after night I go to sleep, a project just about finished-” Orson was skeptical “- and I wake up and bolts are missing, pieces are loose or flapping off! Metal is disintegrating for no reason, Ed! That doesn’t happen. Except to me.” He caught his breath and appeared to be reassembling his train of thought. “And the noise, Ed. The nonstop scraping and grinding. It’s coming from everywhere, but nowhere...” His voice cracked on the last word and his eyes darted to the basement hatch.
Orson backed away a few steps. He did not like this at all. The mechanic was the S-FEL’s last remaining lifeline, and with his sanity now in question and his shop seemingly in active decay, Orson did not like what he was seeing. And after all, the mechanic didn’t have a surplus of clients, and he needed Orson’s business. The man probably needed his company too. Come to think of it , the mechanic was the only person who called him Ed. And so, ill-equipped to ponder the nuances of friendship, Orson considered the situation: One man needed business, and one man needed his ship. There were no two ways about it, and so Orson resigned himself to help. He took a step towards the hatch.
“What’s down there?” he asked. Another beetle crawled across the mechanic’s foot. He jerked his foot back, looked Orson in the eye, and quickly diverted his gaze.
Are you kidding me? Beetles? That can’t be all, can it? Orson thought to himself.
He continued toward the hatch. The scraping sound grew louder. He looked back over his shoulder around the office and landed on a flamethrower hung haphazardly on a rack of various weapons next to the mechanic’s desk.
“If it is the beetles, this should just about do it.” Orson certainly sounded confident, hoisting the weapon over his shoulder. “Any hive is gonna have a tough time against open flame.” He seemed to be saying it more to himself than the mechanic.
“Whatever you need, Ed.” The mechanic was barely holding it together, and Orson minded departing a little less. He blew out a puff of smoke, crushed his cigarette under his foot, gritted his teeth and descended through the hatch.
Inside the tunnel, the walls were made from packed dirt, and the scraping sound felt somehow more suffocating. As he walked, hunched over and wheezing in the cramped tunnel, Orson had the uneasy feeling he was not alone. Tiny scraps of bolts and frayed wires littered the floor and the tunnel was starting to slope steadily down. He stopped for a moment, uneasy, stooped, and picked up a washer. It did not look cleanly broken. Oddly, it looked like it had been… gnawed?
Orson made to stand up quickly and smacked his head on the low roof of the tunnel. Cursing and performing a suppressed jig, he bit his lip and thought back to his ship’s missing screws. Never found on the floor where dislodged screws ought to be, no, the screws tended to simply vanish. Had they been eaten? Orson was now feeling a bit sick. These beetles were metal-eaters. The realization came over him in waves and Orson understood now that they had been slowly destroying his ship as well as the mechanic’s projects and sanity.
These beetles needed to be destroyed. He primed the flamethrower, taking a few purposeful steps forward. Beetles now crawled in steady streams along the walls, and the tunnel was growing tighter as he walked. It ended in a sharp decline a few yards ahead. A few more steps and Orson came upon the ladder to the basement. He slung the flamethrower over his back and made his slow and steady way down, wheezing all the way. After the last step, there were no more rungs and the next few feet down were a sheer drop. He would have to trust the fall to end before it killed him.
Orson thought about the stars behind the beetle, and he thought about his ship. He thought about the mechanic, his shop, and his useless automaton. Orson wished he had another cigarette. Bracing his arthritic legs, Orson let go. Down he fell, not far, but enough to take the wind soundly out him. He did not have a moment to spare before the fact that he was not quite touching the floor dawned on him. Underneath him, hundreds of the tiny, silver beetles crawled, filling the tiny floor space completely, winding a solid path down the short hall into what Orson desperately hoped would be the hive. Then all he would have to do would be to light them up and hope his arms were strong enough to carry him back up to the shop. And the mechanic. And his ship.
Unable to stand against the tide of beetles carrying him towards the dark, winding tunnel, Orson readied himself as best as possible. Nearing the entrance, Orson lit the flamethrower, illuminating the space. He wished he hadn’t.
What had once been a basement was now an unfathomable cluster of shifting, silver masses and walls filled with thousands of tunnels, overlapping and swarming with insects. Where the man-made moon’s mechanical inner core had once been, was now a goliath hive of the beetles who had so easily devoured it. His flamethrower was utterly worthless; a small silver beetle against a blanket of stars.
As the tides of crawling, probing things began to rise, Orson tried to reassure himself. They were only metal-eaters after all. They had been gnawing away at his ship for a quite while now. In fact, he must have brought the infestation here himself; surely it would have killed him by now if it had any interest in human flesh. All he had to do was make it back to the workshop, and he’d be with his ship, and he and the mechanic could get out of here.
The mechanic! Why hadn’t that nervous wreck said anything? He must have noticed all these happenings over the years. Orson certainly hadn’t gotten his ship recently, and the mechanic hadn’t exactly been in a great spot for some time, either. He had avoided his basement door and was building a damned automaton. Why had he never just talked to Ed? Struggling to his feet, Orson tried desperately to wade through the sea of silver and back to the ladder, but his movement seemed to attract them. The swarm, in eerie synchrony, began to shift towards him, in search of edible parts. Finding none, they continued to march. Up his legs, up to his waist, up to his chest…
There was nothing he could do. They had no interest in him as food, he was simply in the way. He thought of the view out his ship’s window, and that one silver beetle crawling across the glass, but as the haunting march continued and the last of Ed Orson disappeared beneath the waves, space thought little of the scowling pilot, and his ship.